Media: Trump targets an old enemy

Last week marked “an outrageous ramping up” of President Trump’s attack on the press, said Jane Merrick in CNN.com. A noticeably testy Trump lashed out at three black journalists, deriding one, a PBS reporter, for a “racist”question when she asked if he had emboldened white nationalists. Earlier in the week, Trump accused CNN’s Jim Acosta of being a “rude, terrible” person after Acosta pressed him with questions about the Central American migrant caravan—then followed up by revoking Acosta’s White House pass. To justify the punishment, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders distributed a video of an intern reaching for Acosta’s microphone, sped up to look as if Acosta “karate-chopped” her arm. “Disseminating lies and smears” against a journalist “evokes George Orwell’s 1984.” Trump is threatening to bar more reporters, said Erik Wemple in WashingtonPost.com, including CNN contributor April Ryan, whom he called a “loser.” This form of censorship is a truly “authoritarian gesture.”

There are two beneficiaries of “the vicious cycle of Trump fighting the press,” said Alexandra DeSanctis in NationalReview.com: Trump and the press. Acosta is delighted to be at the center of attention, and journalists who’ve rushed to his defense are eager to take up the cause of the Resistance. Trump, meanwhile, will continue to seek out clashes with self-righteous reporters, which help the White House “bolster its narrative of a hostile, disingenuous press corps.” It won’t work for Acosta to turn himself into a “self-important martyr,” said Bre Peyton in TheFederalist.com. His “badgering and sexist behavior” were caught on tape, so “when Trump calls him ‘fake news,’ it’s much easier now for the American people to get behind the message.”

Trump was just sour over Democrats’ success in the midterm elections, said Jack Shafer in Politico.com. “Hungry to spend his fury on someone or something,” he turned to a familiar punching bag. Trump treats journalists “as if they were his employees,” and he probably fires Acosta “daily in his mind.” When it comes to the press pass, however, the law is on Acosta’s side. A federal judge in 1977 ruled that the Nixon administration violated a reporter’s rights by barring him from the White House. Now CNN has invoked that precedent in a lawsuit demanding Acosta’s credentials be reissued. Trump can bully and duck reporters all he wants, but he “can’t fire CNN.”